Law enforcement agencies in Texas have received a special threat advisory based on information provided by the Department of Homeland Security indicating Austin, Texas, has been singled out for a terrorist attack on Friday, August 9. Pasadena, California, is also mentioned in the advisory.

A bill recently introduced in the Texas state house aims to reward employers who violate Obamacare, offering subsidies to any company that uses religious objection as an excuse for denying its employees copay-free contraception.

House Bill 649, introduced by state Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R), was apparently inspired by the controversy over craft chain store Hobby Lobby. That store sued to deny its employees contraception coverage, citing its male president’s religious objections. But since Hobby Lobby, and companies like it, will be forced to pay a fine for violating the law, Strickland wants to compensate them with tax breaks:

The tax credit would be limited to the amount of a federal fine that the company pays or the amount of state tax the company owes.

“When a business is being stressed nearly to the point of bankruptcy by punitive federal taxes, of course the state should give them relief,” Stickland said in the news release.[…]

“The Obama administration’s mandate and their threats to bury Hobby Lobby with $1.3 million per day Read more…

Rate this:

Before you know it all driver licenses, public work badges, bus passes, etc. will be tracked/ traced. The Mark of the Beast is coming folks! It is a matter of time before everything is consolidated…

(Credit: Oleg Golovnev /Shutterstock)

A federal judge in Texas ruled Tuesday that a San Antonio high school was permitted to expel or transfer a student if she refused to wear the school’s mandated identification badges.

Last year Northside Independent School District began issuing school IDs embedded with RFID chips, which monitor students’ movements from when they arrive at school until when they leave. One student, 15-year-old Andrea Hernandez was suspended when she refused to wear the ID badge on (albeit slightly loopy) religious grounds — her parents believed the RFID chip to be “the Mark of the Beast.”

Hernandez sued the school district, who tried to accommodate the girl and her family by saying they would remove the RFID chip from her badge, but that she would still need to wear the badge itself. Wired explained that Hernandez family continued to take issue:

The girl’s father, Steven, wrote the school district explaining why Read more…

Rate this:

Galveston, Texas in the Gulf of Mexico has the highest rate of hurricane activity than anywhere else in the USA. The Gulf area reports more hurricane activity than any other part of the US.

The chances that a 15-inch rainfall might hit Central Texas in any given year have long been about 1-in-1,000. But with the warming of air that scientists expect over the century, some predict those chances might jump to 1-in-50.Kerry Emanuel, a prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor, will lecture on the topic in Austin on Tuesday. The talk, titled “Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico: The History and Future of the Texas Coast,” is free and open to the public, part of the University of Texas’ Hot Science-Cool Talks series.

“We expect hurricane-related rainfall is going to get worse over next 100 years,” Emanuel said in an interview.

Rate this:

Schools have been tracking student attendance for some time, but the methods of how students are tracked has significantly evolved over the decades. Currently, using “spychips” in schools appears to be an issue that keeps emerging its controversial head.

These chips, which integrate RFID technology, are embedded in student ID cards.

Technology is available as an easy solution, but is this really the direction society wants to go?

Schools look to “spychips” for student ID cards

The issue of using RFID technology to track students has emerged many times over the past several years. Recently, Digital Journal reported a story where parents and students protestedin San Antonio, Texas after the Northside ISD school district decided to test pilot RFID student ID cards in two of its schools.

Rate this:

Tornado season is only just beginning, but already this year has seen dozens of destructive twisters from Illinois to Texas, where up to 18 might have touched town on Tuesday alone in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“We’re at just the beginning of a very unusual” tornado season, NBC weather anchor Al Roker said on TODAY.

The numbers show just how unusual: March saw 223 twisters, up from an average of 80 from 1991-2010, according to the National Weather Service. February saw 63, compared to an average of 29; and January saw 97, compared to an average of 35.

So what’s behind the outbreak?

“We’ve had record heat,” weather.com meteorologist Greg Forbes told TODAY, and “that warmth is a big ingredient that provides the instability for the storms.”

Last year started off slowly but then saw a record 758 tornadoes in April 2011, noted Roker. “Hopefully we’re not on track for that this year.”